New Plagiarism Policy and Other Updates

Hi everyone - I wanted to take this time and write an article on the new policy we will have regarding plagiarism going forward. I have to say, I was surprised at the amount of plagiarism found on this site with only the 400 members we have. Our support box is filled with requests and they are taking valuable time away from doing other more important things. In light of this, we are going to adopt a new policy. The old policy was we would delete the article, warn you of the infraction and remove the associated coins. Just as in baseball, three strikes and you are out. This is the part that is changing.

Going forward, any articles found to be plagiarised will result in an immediate account ban, along with forfeiting all earned coins to that point. Even if it is a single article, and the other 10 are perfectly fine (for example) that will result in your account being deleted. I wanted to be nice, but regretfully people are abusing the system too much and in order to curb that we need to take a firm stance on this. For the time being, you are still allowed to post your articles you posted elsewhere, so long as you provide the link to the original. However, if your username does not match the name on the source article, that will be considered plagiarism unless you tell us ahead of time. If we find it on our own, your account will be banned.

Everyone will have 36 hours to edit or delete any existing articles you may have that does not abide by this policy. After that time period, any and all plagiarised articles will be subject to immediate deletion, along with the account responsible.

On another note, I have heard recently that a number of people are having issues with the polls and we have spent some time investigating the issue. We have narrowed it down to an issue with the encoding and decoding of the poll data to the database. Basically, it has to to with quotes. You will be unable to vote for any entry that has an apostrophe in it. I do apologize for the inconvienence but we are working on a permeanent fix in addition to a number of other backend items.

As you probably have noticed, we no longer have the "newest member" section up as that became pointless after closing registration. Well, while removing that we also removed the member list. MaeLou has already posted about it, but just incase you missed it it is located up in the navigation menu. Click on "Browse" and you will find it.

I also want to say that we are still behind on both referral bonuses and support email. We are working on getting through them but for the time being we are trying to keep up with all the people who are violating the rules (hence the policy change above). They have become a first priority since we do not want negative content to have any additional impact on our ability to generate advertising revenue.

Finally, I wanted to let everyone know that I personally will be out of town tomorrow so handling support emails will slow a bit. We are working through them as best as we can, but if anything immediate comes up I will handle it when I return. Any cashout requests not handled by tonight will be delayed by an additional 24 hours until I return. I do apologize for the delay.

Comments

I like the first strike and you are out policy on plagiarism. Anyone who has ever submitted original content online knows how negatively plagiarism can affect your work. I continue to be impressed at how aggressive you guys are to address any potential problems that pop up.

It always amazes me that people would plagiarize knowing that it ultimately will catch up to them. Perhaps they figure it will result in a quick payout, but what's the point? Then again, I see many people that do not know English well enough that do it. Still sad behavior.

I'm glad you're taking a strong stance. these people need to know they're not welcome here. Hopefully auto-translations will be next on the hit list. It's probably for the best that you get policies and processes in place for dealing with spammers before you open back up to new members.
The only down side, although not much of one, is that those of us who make legitimate repostings will have to be very careful to ensure that we give proper linkbacks. I know that I missed it on one of my pieces and had to go back and add it.

I completely applaud your support on plagiarism. I don't think that it can be considered an honest mistake as I've heard some try to claim in the past. You know you didn't write it so it's not like you "accidently" copied and pasted it.

I personally would delete Bubblews content prior to posting it here but my username is the same over there as well (I didn't want to have to keep track of more than one, lol). But I wouldn't feel right earning from the same article on two different sites, but that's just my own personal opinion (what others do is entirely up to them).

I want to thank you again for being so great about letting us know in advance whenever something comes up, such as you letting us know ahead of time that payments would be delayed. And for correcting issues so quickly when they come up.

Thank you for the update. I like the one strike your out, I'm just hoping my re-post of my own writing is not considered plagiarism. I have the same account name in both places. Now I'm scared that I should remove it.
As for the polls I did get a reply from ashley and I appreciate the quick reply.

I support all decisions, but IMHO, with all due respect, the severity of immediate, no warning, no notification, termination is a bit Bubblish. I certainly have no intentions of plagiarizing, how many ways of saying "It's a sunny day" are there? To be terminated without knowing what went wrong with no offer of repairing the damage is frightening.

Technically speaking, since people are clearly warned about plagiarism, any violation would be a second-strike. More than fair. Any writer worth having knows plagiarism is wrong. Any web-writer worth having knows Google, et al., will ding us all for it. So, I say zero-tolerance is fair enough.

If the username is the same, then you don't have to worry about it being considered plagiarism. Just make sure that you link back to the original article instead of not putting anything at all or "previously written on Bubblews"

Oh no! An email explaining what went wrong will definitely be sent out when your account is terminated. I think you misunderstood, and he should have clarified. We definitely will not delete and account without an email explaining why.

And, we don't consider a sentence or two to be plagiarized, so "it's a sunny day" would not be considered plagiarism. We are talking about a good chunk or entire content that is obviously not theirs.

Thanks for this update. Plagiarism is stealing. Giving plagiarizers is okay but, in my opinion, three strikes is a little "too much". I think two strikes is fair. But, well, the site is still on its "growing" state so concerned members, like me, should just trust on the site's Admins.

I was thinking the punishment overly harsh considering we are allowed to republish our own works, but then I read the 72 hour time-frame and commend you for finding a way to make sure even that punishment is fair. I plan to make sure that I have a link in both locations so that they are cross-linked since I DO have another site where I use a different username, so I don't want to be assumed to be plagiarizing my own work if my username isn't the same (although my own name is the same in both profiles, so it is verifiable). Thank you for clamping down on those who insist on taking the easy way out while robbing others of what they have honestly earned.

I agree that an aggressive plagiarism policy is best. While there are some practices such as summarizing and rewriting that people don't realize are wrong, flat out copy & pasting is an obvious theft. It does reflect badly on both the site and its contributors when there is a lot of duplicate or poor-quality content.

Some writing platforms set very high standards because of this, but a looser policy is possible if everyone works to police the community together. A lot of folks are reluctant to report violations, but it's best for us all to stand up for the standards of our community. In the end, it benefits all of us.

I love that. Be aggressive and just get rid of them. I don't think they should have anytime to make changes though. Once they are caught they should be gone. If you didn't write it, if your summarizing it, if your re-reporting it it's not your work.

I appreciate your hard work in curbing plagiarism. Gosh, I did not realize it would be such a problem already. I do not understand the point. When you can write personal posts it makes it so easy to write something original. Thanks for all you do for us to make this a great and enjoyable site to belong to.